


Sinistral

by aderyn



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Episode: s01e01 A Study in Pink, Episode: s01e03 The Great Game, Episode: s02e01 A Scandal in Belgravia, Episode: s02e02 The Hounds of Baskerville, Episode: s02e03 The Reichenbach Fall, Long-Term Relationships, Oceans, The Adventure of the Empty House, and long-term love, beach erosion, chirality - Freeform, gun hands, rare shells, treasures
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-11
Updated: 2013-07-11
Packaged: 2017-12-19 03:42:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,699
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/879019
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aderyn/pseuds/aderyn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The last thing you find, sometimes, is exactly what you’re looking for.  </p>
<p>You might find anything at low tide. A pectin. A claw. A scrolled message. The sea in a variegated ladies ear.</p>
<p>Sherlock talking about the chirality of gastropods as he might molecules.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sinistral

**Author's Note:**

> [Emmadelosnardos](http://archiveofourown.org/users/emmadelosnardos/pseuds/emmadelosnardos) said,“remains scattered on the shore, the evidence," and this happened. Thank you Emma!  
>  Thank you to [ PFG](http://archiveofourown.org/users/lizeckhart) and to [ Jude](http://archiveofourown.org/works/877716), for islands and oceans.

 

  _“A sinistral shell is a shell of a gastropod which is 'left-handed'. The shell is coiled in an anti-clockwise direction, so that when viewed from the front (ventral view) with the spire uppermost, the opening or 'aperture' appears on the left…Freak sinistral examples of normally dextral species are highly prized by collectors.”—Carl Ruscoe, The British Shell Club_

The last thing you find, sometimes, is exactly what you’re looking for. No chance of that at low tide, when what the ocean tosses up is what you pick from, the sea-glass and shell, the coral and carrageen and kelp.

You might find anything. A pectin. A claw. A scrolled message. The sea in a variegated ladies ear.

Sherlock talking about the chirality of gastropods as he might molecules.

“Oh,” John says, rubs his left thumb, notes Sherlock’s profile in the sea-fogged air.

The beach town settles around them like a mantle of salt.

Or it did, all those years ago when they were young.

*******

“Oh, Jesus,” John says, “don’t do that Sherlock.”

Sherlock’s palm goes over his mouth and he feels suddenly as though he’s sinking.

“Shh,” Sherlock says in his ear, stops tugging at the loop of copper wire, presses them up against the wall of the soon-to-be-demolished flat. John can feel the dry chill of his calloused fingers, the blunt-cut nails, the strangeness of him that is so familiar, can’t be reduced to the mundane (lens cleaner, ash)or the exotic (black salt, _fiadháin_ and vanilla).

He blinks at nothing passing, the threat Sherlock’s holding them out against. A dust-wisp, a shadow.

Sherlock moves his hand, cups it briefly under John’s jaw.

“Come on up,” he says, chuckles, “from wherever you are. You can scold me now.”

Ten minutes later there’s a tumbling chase that ends in abrasions and an arrest and Sherlock’s cracked rib and John does scold him then, while he’s running his hands, receiver of wreck, over the unoceaned bones.

*******

They first came to Sussex-on-Sea when they were fresh off the pool and the explosives and Sherlock was worn so ragged that he dropped his mobile into the toilet and didn’t realise until John fished it out. Chewed his nails. Paced feverishly. Fell asleep on his feet finally, the violin clutched, the bow spanning his waist as he slumped against the wall and slid down in a strangely graceful heap.

“Sherlock,” John’s hands shot out, pulled at his jacket, loosened his collar, rested on his neck, snapped impatiently at his own thighs, tapped the keys for a retreat while Sherlock slept, wrapped in a light throw, wrestled onto a sofa cushion, on the floor at his feet.

Stultifying, John thought he’d say, at the hamlet, the sea-beaten cottage with the tidepool interior. Instead he hauled up a natural history and buried himself beneath it.

“You might find one on the beaches of South Africa,” Sherlock told him from a pale net of afghan, “the grey cowrie, a sinistral freak, a rare left-handed shell. Washed up there for some human to find.”

“You might,” John said, passed him a plain white mug of tea.

You’d think Sherlock would be out of place in a beach town, sun-aloof, perpetually covered-up, and those things don’t change, but he isn’t out of his element, John discovers over time, his hair stiff with salt and his trousers cuffed against the grey swirl of tide round his ankles. Something wild about him after all.  At land’s end a figure both lonely and at home, toeing the tongues of waves, triggering a memory of something John read long ago, a poem probably, about a bird and the blue deep, either the sky or the sea.

*******

“You,” John says, “are an utter bastard. I’m going out.”

Outside London is sleeting heartily and he stamps out into it and comes back two hours later fuming and ill, both of which he was when he left.

“Are you finished brooding?” Sherlock calls from the kitchen, from which smoke is curling like the ends of hair, “because I could use your…”

“As a matter of fact I’m not.”

John stops, doubles over, coughs, gasps, coughs again, and Sherlock puts a hand on his back, fans smoke with the other.

“John.”

“Fuck," John says, “think I’ve got a cold.”

There’s a choked-off sound from Sherlock, who ushers John to the sofa, opens a window, closes it again, later goes out into the sleet for things that John doesn’t ask for, a chestful of things shiny and small, a spoon, a cherry lozenge, two slick capsules, a cup of something foggy and brackish and fuzzy with sleep.

*******

John drowses and wakes. Laughs hoarsely. Recovers. Gets angry again. Fires a gun. Feels better.

Sherlock finds: a case involving a cobalt-coloured key, the wrong side of a fence, a cluster of bloody horseshoe nails, almost a syringe, a drowned skeleton, in the morgue a set of pretty kidneys and a rare pancreatic anomaly.

Stashes the latter two in the fridge. Smokes. Plays laments. Plays carols.

“Well,” Mycroft says, his fingers peaked in a familiar way, his gaze a familiar glaucous shine, “keep him from danger, will you?”

“What you’ve got there, Doctor Watson,” Irene says, “a gem.” 

Sharpness there, cutting edges, spines, stingers, cursed treasure, poison-- over the fire, in the coffee or the whisky or the air. Going soft not an option. Never has been. The entreaty of Molly, John thinks. Greg Lestrade’s weary eyes.

“What’re we looking for here, Sherlock,” John says on the whispery moor, at the swell in the violet moor-grass.

He doesn’t answer, not really, not for three years.

*******

Broken heart is a root metaphor, yes, the kind that could carry you to a conclusion; home, if you allowed it. Of course John thought in those terms, thought about things _broken_ and _over_ and things washed up ( _like me like me_ ), then angrily dismissed himself and went about, once he could stand, a different life. Set the weapon in the drawer. Watched Harry drink, stop, drink, stop again, blink at him from the clean blue. Held hands. Made notes. Fell in love with a woman, slipped down the side of a triangle between Mer Morstan and another.

Almost got married. Took her not to Sussex-on-Sea but to another seaside village where they spotted a pair of platinum rings in a shop window. Thought about it. Weighed it.

Let himself be carried.

*******

Sherlock came home, drowned but not dead, at six p.m. on a Tuesday in May. Not the day of woe, though from the look that shattered the stillness of John’s face you might not have known it.  

He looked the same but for the pools under his eyes, and those were deep, scurryings at the bottom and injury and silt.  Of course he wasn’t well.  John might have turned his back, turned back into the London he’d finally found. He might not have stationed himself, again, where the break that was Sherlock could touch him.

But he did. While the tide turned at Blackfriars and the wind blew southwesterly off the sea, he did.

*******

Sherlock slept for days. Started at a car backfiring. Spoke six sharp sentences about laser-sights and stopped.  Let John map his scars, most of them, fall off, _mare incognitum_ , at the monster-haunted edges. Had a fit of shivering that lasted twelve hours. Let John touch him in ways he never had, though John’s hand shook and his mouth never carved upwards.

Woke to John’s right on his shoulder, the left over his heart.  

Slept again.

*******

The light from the telly flickers, shallow-water blue, over their faces. The film is violent, American; there are Glocks and a gravity knife, a fair amount of arterial spray.

“I cut a man’s throat once,” Sherlock says suddenly, stops, “I…”

“You had to,” John says, not taking his eyes from the screen, thinking of the teenage sniper he saw die in the desert, how long his sooty lashes, how bright the bloody sediment. Thinking of other things. Breathing.

“You had no other choice.”

They don’t say anything for a while.

John rests a hand on Sherlock’s, gathers it damp and not-soft, crushes it, just once, in the flickering light.

*******

Sherlock did take John’s gun hand in the earliest days. At the kitchen table at Baker Street, at home. After he’d shot Jefferson Hope. To examine it John supposed, invisible residue and aftermath, the cuticles, the nails themselves, the taut trigger finger. Scrutiny. For just a moment though, Sherlock’s cool fingers lifting his, suspending them at eye level, it looked more like wonder; if he hadn’t known better at the time he would have said it was, that Sherlock had something at last, had there in his grasp something he never thought he’d find.

*******

_We don’t find each other so much as run across_ , John might have written then, and what chance what chance.

Mike Stamford, asked about it, might have said none at all or every one in the world.

Not asked, really. But he thinks about it, seeing them in the papers, seeing them through the years, seeing something he saw that first day, not as blind as Sherlock might suppose. It certainly felt momentous. He wouldn’t say a click, not really, or a crash. The rush of the wave onto the shore.

*******

Beach.

It’s not so far from the sea to the homestead. That’s what they call it.

No, that’s what John calls it.

Sherlock rolls the word around on his tongue, surfaces with half a smile.

*******

A flag with the six gold martlets of Sussex.

A scarf, fish-grey, lightweight and new.

A mug, emblazoned.

Ferry tickets.

_Cypraeovula edentula_ scribbled on a scrap.

Six coins they found on the beach.

Ammonite and echinoid fossils in chalk.

A shark’s tooth.

A shell casing.

A photo, printed from real estate site, of a cottage further inland, bee balm in full bloom.

All washed up on their kitchen table.

London’s currents, river and human, roiling outside.

*******

It’s warmer on the south coast. More sun, a summer.

Once Sherlock, unacclimated, still in the long sleeves, flushes and stumbles and brushes John off as he goes for with the nearest cold thing, something icy and alarmingly pink.

“Here,” John says, reaches up to press the cold cup to Sherlock’s face, hands it over.

Sherlock blinks at him, doesn’t scoff, takes a sip, makes a face out of another decade, eats part of it with a plastic spoon, drinks it all, lets it drip, alarmingly pale sweet not-blood, on the front of his pristine white shirt.

Down the high street, John leans on a white gate overrun with dog rose, watches while Sherlock rolls his sleeves up over chalk-cliff forearms.

If he’d written that day, tapped away, waves as soundtrack, cloudless, with the blog locked, if he had, he might have recorded without thinking the odd shape of his own heart.

*******

“Boys,” Mrs. Hudson calls, “boys!”

There’s a watermark on the ceiling.

Of course there is.

There’s a client on the doorstep.

A bobbing up like a buoy, a bell.

*******

This case. Oh bloody hell.

The way Sherlock sights the pieces, nets them, delicately picks them up, gathers them to his gaze, has always made John feel alive, coursed through as nothing else really, not even tugging someone gingerly from death, or the oscillating aftermath of a firefight. Or the primal sweetness of sex, even. Not even that.

“Ah,” Sherlock says, “got it.” Something so tiny, a filament, a scale, between his left index finger and thumb.

_One of the most startling realisations of my life_ , John might have written, _or no, the most._

This last case broke over them, though, a crashing sky-high accident.

“Be a good way to go out,” John says, laughing and wet, joking mostly, his hair full of small kicking things, runnels coursing from his pockets.

“What shall I call it?” John asks over the keys.

“Their Last Row,” Sherlock says, “Boat.”

Gasping is all they can do, clutching at each other, choking and alive, two creatures in a small circle of salvation.

*******

Sometime in the middle, of a Sunday maybe, or a Monday, they’re at Sussex-on-Sea again, drinking hot tea in the dubious sun, not talking, just breathing.

“I know,” John says at last, “that you’re a … that this is a rare thing. I mean.”

He stops, swallows, glances out to sea.

“What are we going to do about it?”

“I…” Sherlock says, doesn’t put his fingers together at the tips, “what do you want to do about it?”

His hands are in his lap, not twisting the clean edge of the untucked shirt, pale blue.

John doesn’t say anything, looking at them.

“Ah, you asked first," Sherlock says. 

John has, many times in his life, made the first move.

He’s also been moved upon, surprised, ambushed, blindsided and bowled over, mostly not on the fields of war. 

Here’s the thing:

It’s difficult not to want to attack a wave, to confront it, to try bending its momentum to your will.

But the real solution is to let it take you, let it carry you across.

*******

“Well,” Sherlock says.

Natural, John thinks, when he puts his hands on John’s shoulders,closes them, leans a little closer.

“I can’t imagine it really.”

“Can’t imagine not being able to do this.”

“No,” John says,“I mean yes.”

The cold air in the hot roots of his hair. 

The salt breeze is in their hair, in their close breath, the air that sticks weapons, stirs curtains, brushes lashes, loosens tongues.

Coaxes a new cache, fabulous and strange, up onto the shore.

*******

London again, the bittersweet tide.

Expirations. Exhaustion.

Sherlock in the flotsam of his own notes, infrastructure, Atlantis, texts John from the kitchen table.

_Need xlilnx_ -SH

His face a pale crescent in the wreckage.

Bags hitting the table and the glint and clink of keys and the squeak of shoes and the sharp intake of fumes, and Sherlock. Those things that through the long years you know as your own breath, better.

“Just come upstairs,” John says.

*******

Sherlock has died six times, John five.

Or nearly.

The last time John woke up in hospital, Sherlock standing by the window with his fingers twisted in the remains of his bloodied coat.

He insists they go after that, to their shelter by the sea.

*******

The beach greets them a year older, eroded. Morning and clearoff. Collateral vegetable and mineral. A gale has passed through in the night.

John picks up the smoothed pebbles and arranges them in code in the sand. Not SOS, though that might have been something like sentiment. Sherlock parses and turns, blinking at him in the sea-shucked light.

“I’d make it permanent,” John says, “but the water’ll take it in an hour.”

“Yes,” Sherlock says, stops his arm, drops in John’s palm a small shell, covers it with the fond wire of his fingers. 

Later Sherlock will find the cleaned cowrie, speckled and shining, nestled in blue cloth in a box on John’s dresser.

It isn’t as if, John thinks, they didn’t know it was a vow.

*******

They walk the shoreline now like old men, though they aren’t, their toes tern-picking the sand, Sherlock’s eyes sharpening at every wave-licked feather.

“We might find it here,” he says.

John’s look, he knows, is the evidence of years.

“We might do,” he says, whatever it is.

The evening comes on hard, waves rising, a wind off the water. Homestead not far.

John shuts the windows against the chill salt air. Pulls the wool up and over. Watches Sherlock’s face in almost-sleep, turned up from its nest like a sea-polished stone.

Lies down.

Lets the night carry them out.

The dawn wash them back up again.

*******

The last case was a bust, yes.

London’s arms are longer than you think, its fingers full of treasure it might send you on with, someday.

Books and bullets and bows. The sweet detritus of tabletop and street.

The moon rises on the sand, sets again.

The tide rises, ebbs, here on their near shore and on a beach far away, over the scarce and the common, the hidden and found, the rare and the beautiful left-handed shell.

 

**Author's Note:**

> fiadháin—Irish Gaelic, “wild stuff”, Irish moss, carrageenan, sometimes made into a dessert  
> [British Shell Club](http://www.britishshellclub.org.uk/pages/articles/sini/artsini.htm)  
> [ Sussex beaches, fossils, shelling](http://www.guardian.co.uk/travel/2007/jul/14/beach.uk13)
> 
> The poem John can’t remember is possibly Sussex-born Shelley's “To a Skylark".
> 
> Sussex-on-Sea is well, fictional. 
> 
> “Loveliness and stillness clasped hands in  
> the bedroom, and among the shrouded jugs and sheeted chairs even the  
> prying of the wind, and the soft nose of the clammy sea airs, rubbing,  
> snuffling, iterating, and reiterating their questions--"Will you fade?  
> Will you perish?"--scarcely disturbed the peace, the indifference, the  
> air of pure integrity, as if the question they asked scarcely needed  
> that they should answer: we remain.”—Virginia Woolf,”Time Passes”,To the Lighthouse


End file.
